this year we're launching a Black Friday special offer that let's you save 40% of any account upgrade.

As usually, the discount applies if you want to buy a new upgrade or prolong your existing one. If you already have an upgrade and it ends in a few months — you can also purchase a prolongation now at the discounted price and it will extend your account for an extra year.

Black Friday is here — as every year we have something special for you. Here's what we got for you this year:

All prices are 40% off till Thursday, 30. November. The discount applies to both new upgrades and prolongations. So even if you current upgrade ends in a few months, you can purchase an upgrade for the next year now for the discounted price.

As usual you can save additional 15% if you chose "Bitcoin" as a payment method.

Upgrading takes just a few minutes. Or even less. Take a look at the upgrade panel. The new prices are already there.

Some of you noticed Wikidot was down yestarday for more than two hour. This is not something that happens often — previous serious outage we had was in November 2014.

The root cause of this outage was Amazon S3 failure. Wikidot, as well as millions of other websites all over the internet, rely on S3 for hosting files. S3 is exactly where we keep the files you upload in your wikis, but it's also where we keep JavaScript and CSS files required for displaying our web pages in your browsers.

Till now S3 has never failed before to this extent. It sure was not a small failure and it took down several other Amazon services. It also affected all services and websites that use Amazon Web Services. It's not just Wikidot alone: Trello, Travis CI, GitHub and GitLab, Quora, Medium, Signal, Slack, Imgur, Twitch.tv, Razer, Apple's iCloud and several other websites could not function properly (or were not reachable at all). A significant percentage of websites all over the world relies on S3 and only now we learned what happens when it's down.

The issue was so severe that even Amazon could not update their status board to let us know about the problems. It was probably hosted on S3 as well… It looks like engineers simply assumed that S3 would be available no matter what.

Wikidot infrastructure design relies on a certain assumption about S3 as well. We simply assumed everything can break, but not S3 itself. Even our backup site (in case databases and servers fail) is hosted on S3.

I guess today several admins and developers (especially from services affected by the S3 outage) try to find a way to loosen their dependencies on S3 and protect their services against similar events. We are going to look at this too — the data you keep with us is our top priority.

Thanks for your understanding and I am sorry for any trouble our outage might have caused.

Me and the Wikidot Team would like to wish you all best. Whether you are going to celebrate upcoming holidays with your families or friends or you are just going to get some rest and prepare for new challenges — may this time fill your heart with peace and happiness! Best wishes!

PS. I also hope at least some of you will see some snow on Christmas :-)

Tomorrow is Black Friday — a highly anticipated day for many Wikidot users. Therefore we have prepared a special deal (yes, a discount!) for all our current and new users — and it starts now! Here are the details:

All prices are 40% off till Tuesday, 29 November. They apply to both new upgrades and prolongations. You can save additional 15% on top of the discount if you pay with bitcoins (simply choose "Bitcoin" at checkout).

There is no exaggeration in saying Pieter was the single most influential person in the Wikidot history — his hyperactivity resulted not only in dramatic changes at Wikidot, but also gave birth to several sub-projects. There was a time we have been working together night and day to make Wikidot better, talked about the future, what's waiting for us. These moments were inspiring and we will remember Pieter as someone who can devote himself completely to make something happen.

Pieter was one of the first persons that helped Wikidot become a truly global project — he was the first one to invest in Wikidot, which allowed us rent an office and hire first developers. He spent months in Poland away from his family to work with us. And to eat pizza with ketchup and mayonnaise :-)

It's not only Wikidot that Pieter left behind — he is pretty well known for work on ground-braking ZeroMQ, various protocols and software projects, his involvement with FOSS movement, but also as a writer. Even a quick look at his Twitter profile shows how many people he inspired and how enormous gap his absence will leave.

It's not fair to say Pieter is gone — his work is still here and will keep inspiring people. I believe the projects he started will be around much longer than lifespan of a single human. But still I can't help the sadness and emptiness after his death.

Last week we have re-shaped our database and made several performance improvements that should directly affect your sites, especially if you use tag and custom field selectors within the ListPages module. Even if not — your sites should appear a bit snappier too since the general load on the databases has decreased significantly.